A Procedure for Exploring Detrimental Weak Emergent Behavior in Complex Systems of Systems

Industrial companies developing complex systems have face challenges with undesired unforeseen system behavior emerging in late development stages or during the system’s operational use. This paper proposes a systematic approach from a Systems Engineering perspective to overcome these challenges. Combining Design of Experiments with regression analysis while conveying a beneficial human vs machine task balance enables us to shift the focus from individual requirements to the overall system design for system testing without overwhelming efforts. We aim to keep the specific performance stated through requirements while ensuring a minimum performance throughout the parameter space. Actively using measurements during the development enables monitoring of the system performance throughout the parameter space facilitating detection and subsequent elimination or reduction of inherent detrimental emergent behavior. The proposed procedure also gives a solid rationale for the case company in what to test and not.